Farmington Faculty


Lea Bryant, Ph.D.

Associate Professor - Health Education

Ph.D., University of Tennessee at Knoxville
M.P.H., University of Tennessee at Knoxville
B.S., Middle Tennessee State University

In the Classroom: Engaging Students — Setting High Academic Expectations
Lea Bryant incorporates a strong background of methodology in her classroom — teaching students how to prepare school health education lesson plans and to create professional-level presentations which can be used in a variety of school settings.

She feels this work is vital because today's teachers often face an increasingly diverse and difficult workload, dealing with social issues and topics sometimes completely outside their area of academic specialty: nutrition, depression, substance use and abuse, domestic and youth violence, etc., issues that all too often impact today's classroom environment.


Outside the Classroom: Innovation and Excitement — Putting Theory into Practice
Lea Bryant has her students perform a number of Service-Learning projects, including those related to specific issues in health education areas such as human sexuality, substance use and abuse, nutrition, teen depression and suicide, and physical fitness.

Her students are working on community health education projects in Phillips (Maine) Middle School, the George Mallett Elementary School in Farmington, and Mt. Blue High School in Farmington.

A recent class project involved working with students at Mt. Blue High School to help their friends who may be dealing with depression or thoughts of suicide, pairing UMF students with a small group of Mt. Blue High School students. The high school students came to the UMF campus and participated in workshops — led by the UMF Community Health Education students — on how to recognize signs of depression in their peers and how to assist their fellow students to seek appropriate help.

Another class project involved a group of six UMF Community Health Education students which studied peoples' perceptions of school violence. The students helped to create an award-winning Youth Conference on School Violence program. The resulting day-long statewide summit, coordinated in conjunction with the Farmington-based Healthy Community Coalition, was held at Sugarloaf/USA and attracted hundreds high school students from across the state of Maine to examine the causes, effects and impact of youth violence.


Classroom Projects with Real-World Health Impacts
And yet another class project led a group of UMF students to plant an organic vegetable garden at UMF's on-campus Sweatt-Winter Community Child Care and Education Center. Lea's Community Health Education students who participated in the project studied the importance of nutrition and also learned organic farming as a by-product of the project. (Sweatt-Winter serves as an on-campus laboratory site for UMF Early Childhood Education practicum students, helping them to develop valuable skills in early childhood education.)

Several years ago, Lea's students were instrumental in the creation of the outdoor Smoke-Free Corridor on campus. The program, implemented over a five-year period, helped to establish Farmington as one of the first smoke-free college campuses in the nation. Students from Lea Bryant's classes developed the roll-out plan and helped to solicit support of the program by the University's top administration. The UMF Smoke-Free Corridor is still in place today. Currently, Bryant has two students working on a reevaluation project, to assess the successful implementation of the program and its impact on the campus.


A True Academic — Areas of Special Interest
Lea Bryant specializes in methods of health education and how to teach health issues in school classroom settings, kindergarten through grade 12. She strongly believes in the need to teach health issues in public school systems because today's teachers often deal with increasingly complex and difficult social issues outside of academics.

She also sees a strong and growing need for students majoring in elementary education and middle/secondary education to gain experience in health education: in things such as nutrition, physical fitness, growth and development, emotional health, environmental health, substance use and abuse, and more.


Respected in the Field — Noteworthy Accomplishments
Lea Bryant serves on several statewide health coalitions, including the Maine Education School Health Coalition and the Coordinated School Health Key Advisory Committee, both run by the Maine Department of Education. Several years ago Bryant helped to obtain a grant by the advocacy group, Tobacco-Free Maine to develop and implement the UMF Smoke-Free Corridor project.


Outside of Academia — Personal Interests and Activities
Outside of her academic life, Lea Bryant trains horses (she has three) and raises her two young children. She resides in nearby Phillips, Maine with her husband, who was recently deployed by the U.S. Army to serve in Afghanistan.

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